I remember life before the Internet. Just checking out a book from the library or making a “long-distance” phone call could be a time consuming chore. Taking pictures and getting them “developed” could be days or even weeks --- and you weren’t even able to edit them!
Nowadays, not only can I access most any book or manual almost instantaneously but can order most any commodity while sitting at my internet-connected computer. I can indulge in games ranging from Scrabble to massive multi-player war games joining a team whose members are most likely situated all around the world --- possibly fostering international understanding. I can join social groups to find like-minded folks and keep in touch with friends and relatives. Today I can carry in my pocket all of the above plus take photos and edit them, make phone calls, watch movies, listen to stories while driving, set reminders, keep a calendar and....well, just go to your favorite app store to be inundated by all of the enticing choices available to fritter away your time.
On the Dark Side, the Internet facilitates one’s tendency to correct those whose views they believe are incorrect --- and not in a nice way. I’m sure I’m not the first to realize that civil discourse will continue to degrade so long as the Internet continues to allow hate speech. According to Wikipedia, “The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that hate speech is legally protected free speech under the First Amendment.”
According to software engineer Brianna Wu in a recent New York Times article,”I Wish I Could Tell You It’s Gotten Better. It Hasn’t.” she describes how sexist hate threats disrupted her and fellow workers until they quit or gave up their careers. Until we can find a compromise between civility and free speech we are certain to keep kicking this can down the road.
But don’t get me wrong --- in a very very small way I was responsible for the creation of the Internet (many thanks to Al Gore who pushed Congress to appropriate funding for this project.) Way back in the late 60s and early 70s I was lured away from my job as a programmer-analyst at the Center for Naval Analysis in the DC area to work on the ILLIAC IV project at the University of Illinois.
I was part of a team who believed we could build a powerful supercomputer (the ILLIAC IV) to solve some of the nagging societal problems like weather prediction, how proteins fold to create the structure of DNA, and pretty much any issue that required massive number-crunching in a reasonable amount of time. If we could get the ILLIAC IV up and running on some sort of a network connected to other supercomputers, we believed we were going “to make the world a better place to live in.” Remember, this was “The Age of Aquarius”. It was an exciting, heady time to be alive.
We were funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency(ARPA) under the Department of Defense and they had additional goals for the project. Their main concern was to create a network of cooperating computers that not only would speed up scientific research but would also create a network of computers impervious to the loss of any individual computer on it. In an attack on the US, the network could survive by routing connections around the disbabled site with none of the remaining sites aware of the switching. In this way the working sites could continue to operate and cooperate. From a military point of view this made a lot of sense. In a short period of time the ARPAnet evolved into the Internet and its governance was turned over to several international governing bodies. For more information link to; icann.org
But enough history --- a half-century has passed and we are reaping the benefits as well as the unintended consequences of our creation: the Internet and the World Wide Web which runs on it. Unlike the myth of a Frankenstein monster (as portrayed in the film, not the book) we cannot easily destroy the Internet but let’s hope that with a little more respect toward others and a lot more introspection we can guide the course of its development in a more humane and useful direction.
